Tag Archives: evangelists

Ten Reasons Every B2B Company Needs an Evangelist

Ten Reasons Every B2B Company Needs an Evangelist

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

The importance of evangelists in organizations around the world is often misunderstood or underestimated, and too few organizations have made the incredibly rewarding investment into one or more of the valuable types of evangelists – who are particularly valuable in B2B organizations for reasons I hope will be obvious by the end. Let’s set the stage.

An evangelist in a B2B company is a passionate advocate for a brand, product, service or innovation. Their role involves spreading the word about the company’s offerings, building relationships, and inspiring others to become customers or supporters. They are often seen as the face of the company, engaging with the community, attending events, and creating content to promote the brand. So, without further delay, let’s look at the top ten reasons every B2B company needs an evangelist:

  1. Increased Brand Awareness: Evangelists help spread the word about the brand, reaching new audiences and increasing visibility.
  2. Improved Reputation: Having passionate advocates can enhance the company’s reputation and build trust with potential customers.
  3. Higher Customer Loyalty: Evangelists are often the most loyal customers, and their enthusiasm can inspire others to stay loyal as well.
  4. Cost-Effective Marketing: Evangelists can provide valuable marketing support without the high costs associated with traditional advertising.
  5. Enhanced Customer Relationships: Evangelists build strong relationships with customers, providing personalized support and fostering a sense of community.
  6. Increased Sales: By promoting the brand and its products, evangelists can drive sales and generate leads.
  7. Valuable Feedback: Evangelists often provide insightful feedback on products and services, helping the company improve and innovate.
  8. Thought Leadership: Evangelists can position the company as a thought leader in the industry, sharing expertise and insights.
  9. Employee Morale: Having a dedicated evangelist can boost employee morale by showcasing the company’s strengths and successes.
  10. Competitive Advantage: A strong evangelist can differentiate the company from competitors, highlighting unique selling points and creating a loyal customer base.

Finding an Evangelist to Hire

If your B2B company doesn’t already have at least one evangelist (see the five types at the bottom), there is no better time than the present to make that first hire, or to hire additional types of evangelists to maximize your success. There is nothing wrong with hiring an evangelist from outside, especially when you don’t want to pull existing employees out of roles they’re already excelling at or when an external hire brings higher levels of skill than the internal resources you think might be best suited to such a role. Here is how to get started with that next hire:

  1. Identify Key Traits: Look for candidates who are passionate, knowledgeable, authentic, influential, and committed. These traits are essential for an effective evangelist.
  2. Leverage Networks: Utilize professional networks like LinkedIn, industry events, and conferences to find potential evangelists. Look for individuals who are already advocating for similar products or services.
  3. Engage with Communities: Participate in online communities, forums, and social media groups related to your industry. Engage with active members who demonstrate a genuine interest in your field.
  4. Job Listings: Post job listings on relevant job boards and websites, clearly outlining the role and its importance. Highlight the impact the evangelist will have on the company’s growth.
  5. Referrals: Encourage your employees and industry contacts to refer potential candidates. Referrals often lead to finding passionate and dedicated individuals.

Cultivating an Evangelist from Within

If you don’t feel comfortable hiring an evangelist from outside, either with or without some level of rotational exposure to all of the different parts of organization, or if you know you have some really skilled and passionate internal resources you think are ready to step into a new role, that’s fine too.

  1. Identify Potential Evangelists: Look for employees who are already passionate about your brand and products. These individuals often go above and beyond in their roles and are enthusiastic about sharing their experiences.
  2. Provide Training and Resources: Offer training programs to help employees develop their evangelism skills. Provide resources such as marketing materials, product information, and access to industry events.
  3. Create a Supportive Environment: Foster a culture of evangelism within your company. Encourage employees to share their ideas and experiences, and recognize their efforts publicly.
  4. Offer Incentives: Provide incentives for employees who actively promote the brand. This could include bonuses, recognition programs, or opportunities for career advancement. (Editor’s Note: Sorry CoPilot I’m not sure I agree with this one)
  5. Engage with Employees: Regularly engage with employees to understand their needs and motivations. Create opportunities for them to share their feedback and ideas.

Whether you hire your evangelists internally or externally it is important to think through how to best introduce and integrate them into every part of the organization relevant to the type of evangelism role they are filling. At this point you might be wondering how there might be more than one type of evangelist, so let’s look at briefly and if you follow the link you’ll learn more details about each.

Here are Five Types of Evangelists to Consider Hiring

In my previous article Rise of the Evangelist I defined five different types of evangelists that organizations may already have, or may want to hire, including:

  1. Chief Evangelist
  2. Brand Evangelists
  3. Product Evangelists
  4. Service Evangelists
  5. Innovation Evangelists

This specialization occurs when the evangelism an organization needs become too big for one evangelist to handle. At that point, a Chief Evangelist creates the evangelism strategy and manages the execution across the team of brand, innovation, and other evangelism focus areas.

I dive more into the role and considerations for companies on how An Innovation Evangelist Can Increase Your Reputation and Innovation Velocity.

What Are You Waiting For?

Evangelism isn’t just a marketing activity. Evangelists are incredibly important to enhancing not just the customer experience, but the employee and partner experiences as well. Not everyone may have main character energy but almost everyone still appreciates main character level credit, and this can be incredibly impactful for all three main constituencies – customers, employees and partners. Tell those stories, translate that value and make the investment into an evangelist today!


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Content Authenticity Statement: Some of the lists and paragraphs in the article were created with the help of Microsoft CoPilot, but there are also some paragraphs created by me along with content from some of my previous articles.

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An Innovation Evangelist Can Increase Your Reputation and Innovation Velocity

Chief Evangelist Braden Kelley

by Braden Kelley

Building upon my popular article Rise of the Evangelist, I wanted to create an article for the global innovation community focused specifically on the importance of the innovation evangelist role.

In my previous article I defined five different types of evangelists that organizations may already have, or may want to hire, including:

  1. Chief Evangelist
  2. Brand Evangelists
  3. Product Evangelists
  4. Service Evangelists
  5. Innovation Evangelists

This specialization occurs when the evangelism an organization needs become too big for one evangelist to handle. At that point, a Chief Evangelist creates the evangelism strategy and manages the execution across the team of brand, innovation, and other evangelism focus areas.

When should an organization focus on innovation evangelism?

To continue to exist as a business, every organization should build an infrastructure for continuous innovation, but many don’t. If you’re not sure what this looks like, here is my Infinite Innovation Infrastructure (which leverages the Nine Innovation Roles):

Infinite Innovation Infrastructure

For those organizations investing in innovation, it is crucial to also invest in innovation evangelism when:

  1. Innovation is part of the company’s strategy
  2. Innovation is central to competitive differentiation
  3. The company wants to share their innovation stories
  4. The company wants to partner with customers to innovate
  5. The company wants to partner with suppliers to innovate
  6. The company wants to engage experts in innovation
  7. The company wants to engage the general public in innovation

You’ll notice many of these points hint at the need for an external talent strategy, and Innovation Evangelism must play a key role. Because of this, I encourage you to download and consult the success guide I created for Innocentive on Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation which focuses on the elements and importance of external talent in any company’s innovation efforts.

Bill Joy, a co-Founder of Sun Microsystems, once famously said:

“There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.”

Any external talent strategy must accumulate energy and then unleash it in a focused direction. And part of the way to do that is by establishing a common language of innovation. The process begins by defining what innovation means to your organization. Consider looking at this as the WHO – WHAT – WHEN – WHERE – WHY – HOW of innovation:

  • WHO is to be involved in your innovation efforts?
  • WHAT does innovation mean to you? WHAT types of innovation are you focused on?
  • WHEN will you be looking for innovation input?
  • WHERE can people go to find out more? WHERE do they go to contribute?
  • WHY should people want to participate?
  • HOW can they participate?

Continue reading this article on InnovationManagement.se

… where we will answer these questions and more:

  • Should innovation evangelism be a role or a job?
  • What does an innovation evangelist do?
  • What makes a good innovation evangelist?


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Rise of the Evangelist

Chief Evangelist Braden Kelley

by Braden Kelley

What is an evangelist?

When many people hear this term, their minds used to picture Billy Graham or Pat Robertson, but this is changing. Why?

Our perceptions of evangelists are transforming as the pace of change accelerates to construct a new reality faster than most human brains can process the changes.

This creates a chasm in understanding and change readiness that evangelists can help bridge in a number of different ways.

Let us look at what an evangelist really is…

Oxford Dictionaries say an evangelist is a “zealous advocate of something.”

Nine Innovation Roles EvangelistIn business, the evangelist is a role that any of us can take on (with varying levels of success). Evangelism is very important to innovation success, which is why the evangelist is one of The Nine Innovation Roles™. This is how I define this particular role:

“The Evangelists know how to educate people on what the idea is and help them understand it. Evangelists are great people to help build support for an idea internally, and also to help educate customers on its value.”

Notice at this point we are talking about an evangelist as a role that can be played by one or more people, and not as a job that one or more people hold. Evangelism normally will be a role and not a job, but there are inflection points where this must change.

Outside of an innovation context, evangelism often falls on the shoulders of CEOs, business owners and product managers within organizations. When the need for evangelism is small, this can work. But for most organizations, this is no longer the case.

When should you hire an evangelist?

The time to cross over from evangelism as a role to evangelism as a job is when:

  1. The pace of internal change is accelerating faster than employees can grasp without help
  2. The pace of external change is accelerating faster than customers can understand without help
  3. Your company is facing disruption by new entrants or existing competitors
  4. You’re considering a digital transformation
  5. You’ve already embarked upon a digital transformation
  6. You’re using Agile in product development
  7. Your brand essence is being shifted by you or your customers
  8. You need a more human and personal presence in your marketing efforts to better connect with customers

When one or more of these conditions are true, you’ll find that it isn’t possible for CEOs, business owners and product owners to meet the needs for evangelism in the short spurts of time these people can dedicate to the necessary activities.

As highlighted by Agile Product Development’s presence in the list, organizations leveraging Agile to develop software-based products will find that their product managers are always engaged with the backlog with little time to focus on evangelism. They’re always focused on shipping something.

Some organizations will resist adding evangelists to their team, feeling that such a role is superfluous, but having one or more people focused on evangelism delivers value to the organization by executing a range of incredibly important activities, including:

  • Growing awareness
  • Building a community around the company and/or plugging the company into pre-existing external communities (potentially taking the brand to places it has never been before)
  • Generating interest
  • Working with customers and the marketing team to identify the stories that need to be told and the themes that need to be introduced and/or reinforced
  • Creating desire
  • Building and maintaining conversations with the community that cares about your products/services/brands
  • Engaging in an open and honest dialogue to help gather the voice of the customer
  • Facilitating action
  • Practicing a human-centered design mindset to continuously elicit needs and surface wants and desired outcomes

Depending on the size of the organization you may decide to have a single evangelist, or some larger organizations have more than one type of evangelist, including:

  1. Chief Evangelist
  2. Brand Evangelists
  3. Product Evangelists
  4. Service Evangelists
  5. Innovation Evangelists

This specialization occurs when the evangelism an organization needs become too big for one evangelist to handle. At that point a Chief Evangelist creates the evangelism strategy and manages the execution across the team of brand, product, service and other evangelism focus areas.

So what makes a good evangelist?

Evangelists arrive from a range of different job specialties, but key knowledge, skills and abilities include:

  • Empathetic
  • Passionate About the Company’s Mission, Products/Services, and Customers
  • Comfortable Public Speaker
  • Efficient and Effective Writer
  • Human-Centered Design Mindset
  • Experienced with Social Media, Audio and Video
  • Skilled Content Creator
  • Continuous Learner
  • Self-Directed and Comfortable with Ambiguity

… and ideally your chosen evangelists will already have some presence in the communities important to you, or the knowledge of how to establish a presence in these communities.

Customer buying journeys are notoriously unpredictable, meandering, long and non-linear. Evangelism is a critical part of helping to build relationships with potential buyers and increasing the chances that your brand will be top of mind when a non-buyer finally becomes a potential customer of your products or services.

It’s a long-term non-transactional investment, one that will pay dividends if you see the wisdom in making the expenditure.

Has your organization already invested in evangelists? What learnings would you like to share in the comments?

Are you ready for the evangelists to rise in your organization?

Or do you need help with evangelism? (contact me if you do)

Share the love!

p.s. I wrote a follow-up article for InnovationManagement.se that you might also enjoy — Increase Your Innovation Reputation and Velocity with an Innovation Evangelist


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